05 February 2008

my budding new career!

Well, I've just embarked on my exciting new career as a biochemist and I'm having initial success! To get the hang of some of the techniques I'll need in my chosen post-doc project, Sean is letting me loose in his lab, isolating an enzyme from bacterial genomic DNA. And below is my first, very impressive DNA gel of my two new genes!

Now I get to put them into cells and get the cells to turn the genes into proteins which I can study. Fun!

3 comments:

Ruth said...

My word, you'll be splitting the atom next!

Anonymous said...

cool! What would you like this protein to do?

A said...

It's supposed to do one of the biosynthetic steps of lysine (can't remember which one, but I'll find out when I come to do kinetics), but until we have the enzyme pure we can't be sure. We figure out if it's likely to be the one we want by comparing the gene sequence with the known examples of the enzyme we want, but they're always different.

I'm mostly just doing it to learn some new skills though, it's not likely to be anything too exciting.

x

PS, man, I SOOOOO split the atom at undergraduate, Roofie. You are so behind the times. :-)